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Linked Open Data is getting more attention from the information world, as well as from memory institutions. But what exactly is it and more important, why is it a good thing? To explain this, Europeana has released an animation.

The concept of Linked Open Data is attracting Europe’s major national libraries: the Bibliothèque nationale de France recently launched its rich linked data resource, while the national libraries of the UK, Germany and Spain, among many other cultural institutions, have been publishing their metadata under an open licence.

Europeana is making data openly available to the public and private sectors alike so they can use it to develop of innovative applications for smartphones and tablets and to create new web services and portals.

Support for Open Data innovation is at the root of Europeana’s new Data Exchange Agreement, the contract that libraries, museums, and archives agree to when their metadata goes into Europeana.

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The Data Exchange Agreement has been signed by all the national libraries, by leading national museums such as the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and by many of the content providers for entire countries, such as Sweden’s National Heritage Board. The new Data Exchange Agreement dedicates the metadata to the Public Domain and comes into effect on 1 July 2012, after which all metadata in Europeana will be available as Open Data.

The following post is by Lotte Belice Baltussen, project worker R&D at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. This is part one of three blog posts about the Dutch initiative Open Culture Data, that aims to make cultural datasets available under open conditions and stimulate their re-use.

The cultural heritage sector is becoming more aware of the power of open data. GLAMs (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) realise that open access to data helps drive users to online content and that it enables the creation of new innovative services. Hence it supports cultural institutions in the fulfilment of their public mission to open up access to our collective heritage. Secondly, it stimulates collaboration in the GLAM world and beyond. This allows the creation of new services and supports creative reuse of material in new productions. In short: collaboration supports innovation. As Bill Joy notes in his ‘Joys law’: “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else”. Thus, encouraging external parties to re-use publicly available sources stimulates innovation in the GLAM sector and results in services of higher quality and diversity.

Based on these developments, the existing Dutch Heritage Innovators Network – a network that stimulates innovation in the GLAM sector – launched the ‘Open Culture Data’ (Open Cultuur Data in Dutch) initiative in September 2011. The aims: make cultural datasets available under open conditions and stimulate the creation of useful and innovative applications in which these are incorporated. Two members of the Innovators Network spearheaded the initiative: the social innovation think-tank Knowledgeland and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. From the start, we collaborated with Hack de Overheid (Hack the Government), a community that facilitates and stimulates the open availability of government data in the Netherlands and the creation of new applications based on this data. In this post, we describe how we did it and what the outcomes have been so far.

Collecting Open Culture Data

In order to stimulate re-use, we collected and contributed datasets for the national app contest Apps for the Netherlands organised by Hack de Overheid that was held from September 2011 to January 2012 and which was primarily aimed at re-using open governmental data. For this, we defined rules and tips in order to make clear to contributors what principles open culture data should at least adhere to, such as not excluding commercial re-use and making clear that there is a distinction between licenses for open data and open content.

With these principles in mind, we hit the road, organised workshops and sent countless emails and made about as many phone calls to our colleagues in the Dutch cultural heritage world to open up datasets.

Open Culture Data workshop during the Apps for the Netherlands hackathon in November 2011. Photo by: Breyten Ernsting

In the next posts, we will write about the great apps (13 in total) that were made with these Open Culture Datasets for the Apps for the Netherlands competition. Furthermore, we will outline the lessons learned during the first months of the project and the exciting future plans.

With Open Culture Data, we envision the future cultural heritage to be open, built on intelligent infrastructures and on the concept of participation between the various stakeholders. This will allow heritage organisations to excel in terms of knowledge, applications and technologies for the wide range of end users they cater to. If you have questions, remarks ideas or any other input about our mission and the project, don’t hesitate to get in touch!

Good news from Germany: The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (DNB), the German National Library, has launched a Linked Data version of the German National Bibliography under Creative Commons Zero meaning that the information can be re-used without legal restriction.

The bibliographic data of the DNB’s main collection (apart from the printed music and the collection of the Deutsches Exilarchiv) and the serials (magazines, newspapers and series of the German Union Catalogue of serials (ZDB) have been converted. This is an experimental service that will be continually expanded and improved.”

The release of the bibliographic data as Linked Open Data means that the DNB joins a host of other cultural heritage institutions such as the British Library and the Swedish National Library who have taken a similar course.

Linked Open Data makes sure that information from one cultural dataset can be linked with information from another dataset in a meaningful way. This could be two datasets from different institutions, or, indeed, two datasets from the same organisation. The possibilities are endless as long as everybody uses unique URI’s for their data. More information about how Linked Open Data works can be found here.

Now that more and more cultural institutions see the importance of Linked Open Data, Richard Wallis, from the Data Liberate blog, predicts that this will be the first of many such announcements this year.